A colleague asked me recently:
"Why does it seem like whatever random topic comes up in conversation, you always seem to know something about it?"
I didn't have a ready answer.
But sitting with it later, I think I know why.
I've been an amateur engineer, an aspiring doctor, a history obsessive, an archer, a pistol shooter, a judoka, a dog sledder, a camper, a chess player, a guitarist, and a runner.
I've started more things than I can count and abandoned most of them before they got hard.
For years I thought that was a flaw.
Writing taught me it was raw material.
The problem with trying everything
The scattered life feels productive because you're always doing something.
There's always a new skill, a new identity to try on. And for a while, each one feels like the answer.
This is it. This is who I am.
But after a while the shine fades. The downsides surface. It doesn't quite fit with the other parts of your life. So you abandon it. And you look back at your own personal junkyard of abandoned pursuits and wonder what's wrong with you.
You're not building a life. You're accumulating evidence that you can't finish anything.
Why writing is different
Before I started writing things down, all my thoughts and dreams were floating around like clouds.
Always moving. Difficult to pin down.
Then I started writing my goals in a notes app. It seemed innocent enough. But soon I'd hit a goal I'd dreamed of achieving for years — one I'd never actually committed to paper before.
Writing turned my thoughts from clouds to clay.
And clay I could work with.
Writing forces you to say what you actually think. Not what sounds good, not what you wish were true, but what you actually believe when you sit down and commit it to a sentence.
Trapped in ink, it cannot move. It stares back at you, naked. And only then can you see, over time, whether this is truly who you want to become.
The first few hundred days of writing weren't about output.
They were excavation.
Each piece a small probe into what matters and what doesn't.
What burned away
Some identities didn't survive the writing.
I once wanted to become a doctor because I wanted a life that felt deeply meaningful. And it is — but daily introspective writing made me realize it violates one of my other core needs: freedom.
A doctor is bound to a hospital, to a bureaucracy that gives you minutes per patient. No amount of meaning could compensate me for that.
I also wanted to move to Northern Sweden and become a dog sledder. I got my first Alaskan Malamute with this in mind. It felt like a dream of freedom.
But looking deeper, I realized I'd just inverted the doctor problem. Plenty of freedom in nature. But far less meaning than I ultimately need. A good life, no doubt. Just not the mission I'm actually after.
Writing didn't kill these dreams. It just showed me, clearly and without sentiment, that they weren't mine.
What remained
When you smelt ore, everything that isn't gold burns away. The waste, the noise, the things that seemed valuable until the heat proved otherwise.
That's what writing does over time.
It smelts the metals of your dreams until only the gold remains.
For me, what remained was this:
I want to be a guide. Someone who helps others get free (physically and financially), and builds the megaphones and systems to reach as many people as possible with that message.
Rousseau wrote in 1762: "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains."
Nearly 300 years later I feel that's still true.
Men are obese, enslaved by debt, lonelier than ever. I want physical strength and financial freedom for every man who'll listen.
Writing is what made that clear. Not as a vague aspiration but as a direction I can actually build toward.
And the first step in that direction is getting out of my own chains.
That's what writing helped me understand.
Right now that looks like this newsletter, a freelance email business I'm building one outreach message at a time, and a 9-to-5 I'm working to make optional.
The gold doesn't appear. it reveals itself.
Some people find themselves by trying enough things. Others find themselves by writing honestly about what they've already tried until a pattern emerges.
The junkyard isn't the destination. It's the raw material.
Sometimes the gold is buried in what you've already burned through. Sometimes it's in territory you haven't reached yet.
Writing is how you find out. It sharpens your questions until the right direction stops feeling like a guess.
P.S. If you're still figuring out which direction to build toward, the 9-5 Escape Quiz at uglyemails dot com might help you find a starting point.
In 3 minutes it shows you your exact bottleneck and what to fix first. I built it because writing gave me the direction, but I still needed to figure out which wall to climb first.
